Podcast Pre Production

I finally started working on what I’ll call pre-production for Another Dead Rockstar, the podcast I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years and have mentioned here a couple of times.

I’ve decided that in the next week I’ll at least have one episode scripted and ready. To get to that point though I first have had to make a really long, somewhat depressing, list of dead rockstars/musicians. I spent a couple of hours doing that today. First off the top of my head and then by digging through lists online. It is far from comprehensive and will be constantly growing but it gives me a good base.

The next step will be to pick the first subject of an episode. I think the most sensible thing to do is to choose someone who I already have an affection for. I’m going to need to be doing a lot of listening and reading about each episodes subject so I may as well start with someone I enjoy. I am looking forward to digging into some people I either don’t know much about or previously didn’t like too much though.

Then comes the time consuming part of listening to as much of the person as possible and taking notes, reading about the history, inspirations, influences, career and legacy and picking talking points out about all of that. This stage is really going to be the bulk of the process and the thing I was hoping to be able to share the load with a co-host. Until such time as someone comes on board though, I’ll be doing all this myself.

After that I’m going to write up an episode plan, a script of sort. I’m no good at reading verbatim from a script and making it sound interesting so this will be much more like bullet points and a sort of frame work for the episode. I was hoping to have someone else to bounce back and forth off but it looks like I’m going to do the first couple of episodes by myself.

Recording will be fairly straight forward I would have though. Going through the episode plan. I’ll have to test my levels and everything as bad audio ruins a podcast quicker than anything and it has been a while since I was in charge of recording one.

Editing will be a bit more work though as I’ll be looking to intercut clips of songs when appropriate and I’ll inevitably need to trim out some “um’s” and “ah’s” and generally tighten the show up. I used to do this every week so hopefully it will all come back to me when I start doing it again.

I’m excited to get it going though and I’m really happy that I have taken the first step towards it. Getting it going was one of my resolutions for the year and I’ve made a start!